The use of stents in bodily lumen is well known. A stent is typically delivered in an unexpanded state to a desired location in a bodily lumen via a stent delivery device such as a catheter. Once the stent is at the desired bodily location, it is either expanded with a balloon or other suitable device or allowed to expand by, for example, withdrawing a restraining sheath.
Some stents may be used to place Guglielmi electrolytically detachable coils, for example as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,947,962, incorporated herein by reference.
Stents are desirably flexible in order to be delivered through a tortuous anatomy. As the amount of curvature along the length of a stent is increased, some stents may reach a point where adjacent struts contact one another. If the amount of curvature is further increased, the stent may undesirably kink.
There remains a need for a stent that may be maneuvered through areas of high curvature. There remains a need for a stent that may be deployed at an area of high curvature.
All US patents and applications and all other published documents mentioned anywhere in this application are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
Without limiting the scope of the invention a brief summary of some of the claimed embodiments of the invention is set forth below. Additional details of the summarized embodiments of the invention and/or additional embodiments of the invention may be found in the Detailed Description of the Invention below.
A brief abstract of the technical disclosure in the specification is provided as well only for the purposes of complying with 37 C.F.R. 1.72. The abstract is not intended to be used for interpreting the scope of the claims.